Several people have asked us for more detailed comparisons between the current leading digital SLRs: The Comparometer(tm) is great, but can be cumbersome when trying to compare specific aspects of several cameras at the same time. People asked for something showing all the cameras together, in a format that would deal with color and resolution issues. To that end, we went through and cropped out key areas of several of our test targets, and assembled the results into the tables shown below. The result really didn't at all fit our normal layout, so we've just tossed them onto this page for our readers' convenience. We'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but have added a few comments here and there.

When you're done, here are links to get back to the picure-index pages of the various cameras represented below:

For the first set of images, we cropped out the MacBeth(tm) chart from our standard "Davebox" target. We made no adjustments for exposure, although that does affect the color saturation somewhat. - All exposures are as determined by the camera's auto exposure system. Images have been reduced in size to fit here.

Original Nikon D1(Note: Old version of MacBeth chart, hence slightly different aspect ratio. Also, its color space is NTSC, hence looks odd here (not converted to sRGB for web display)

Nikon D1x

Canon D30

Minolta Dimage 7(Prototype)

Olympus E10

Fuji S1

Our "House" poster has a lot of very fine detail in it, so is a handy tool for comparing camera resolution on *exactly* the same subject. (It was shot with a 4x5 view camera with a razor-sharp lens, scanned to a 500 MB file, then output on a 600 dpi photograpic output device at a size of about 40x50.) Comparing natural images like this is a little tricky with cameras having different file sizes. We've scaled the images to match the horizontal dimension of the largest of the set, using bicubic interpolation in Photoshop. The results are interesting, to say the least: The 3 megapixel D30 does amazingly well. It's important to note though, that the D1x produces considerably better results when shots are saved in the NEF format, and then interpolated after the fact on the computer. We'll try to do a reshoot of this later this week, and share those results here.

Original Nikon D1

Nikon D1x(Shot with normal sharpening, etc. Sharpening is a little heavy-handed in this image, obscuring some detail. Better would be to shoot in NEF mode with no sharpening, use Qimage or Bibble to extract maximum-res file. - Even at that though, we're surprised the D1x didn't look sharper here - we'll try reshooting this as we suggested, see what it looks like.)

(The original for this shot was framed rather loosely, requiring a greater amount of resampling to match exactly. We thus chose to not show it, rather than convey an inaccurate impression of the camera's performance.)

(The original for this shot was apparently captured with the sharpening set to the "hard" position. We thus chose to not show it, rather than convey an inaccurate impression of the camera's performance.)

Minolta Dimage 7(Prototype)

Olympus E10(Competes quite well for a 4MP CCD.)

Fuji S1(Also does well for what's basically a 3 MP sensor, upsampled to 6MP)

Not much comment needed on this one - these are just crops from the ISO-12233 resolution target. The only note we have is that these were tone-adjusted in Photoshop, to prevent differences in brightness/contrast from swaying people's perception of the images.

Original Nikon D1

Nikon D1x

Canon D30

Minolta Dimage 7(Prototype)

Olympus E10

Fuji S1

The vertical-axis res target elements. Same note as above, vis a vis the tonal adjustment.

Original D1

Nikon D1x

Canon D30

Minolta Dimage 7

Olympus E10

Fuji S1

Interesting, eh? No doubt about it, these are some fun times in the photo business!

Here are links to visit the picure-index pages of the various cameras represented above: